Last night I spent the evening rubbing shoulders with some of the best and brightest traditional (and some online) marketers in the Capital Wasteland Region at a holiday party (There are many of them this time of year, are there not?).

As I stood there talking with a frequent reader of this blog, who also happened to work at Potomac Tech Wire, we got to discussing lessons learned from various times in our careers. I remember distinctly one of these moments from my days at b5media, which challenged me to remember that even though you think you know your job, career, industry or environment… you really don’t.

It was a Thursday night, like any other Thursday night. My son was in bed and my wife and I were dlipping around channels. One of our favorite shows, The Unit had just gone off at 10pm when all of the sudden, my Blackberry started buzzing. Annoyed, I glanced at it and saw alerts pouring in that the b5media servers were going down.

In those early days, I was the only full time tech person with b5media but Sean was putting in some hours as well. Both our Blackberrys were going off. Off to work, we went, at 10:05 pm.

It took awhile to go through the normal routines of checkup, because things were not responding at all. Finally logging in, Sean managed to dig around at all the usual traffic suspects but didn’t find any of them getting any kind of significant traffic. Trolling around more, we found out actually that this site was doing tremendously well after an episode ended minutes before with a cliffhanger that made fans think the main character was dead. If I recall, we were serving approximately 10,000 requests every second.

How would we have known, as non-Grey’s Anatomy fans that this was coming? What warning did we have? Fortunately, when the 1am shift arrived and the west coast had their opportunity to freak and panic and start hitting the site, we were expecting the surge.

It goes to show that when doing business with an internet audience, you can make assumptions (or fail to make assumptions) but it’s the things you don’t know that will take you down if you don’t appropriately adjust and grow with each learning opportunity.

As I discussed the sale of eBooks and MP3s with a marketer last night, it was the concept of transparency being not only great but required to make meaningful sales online, I wonder if that knowledge she now knows will help her in her online business.

Be smart, be wise, and learn where you can. It can make the difference in your online business.